It started at a rehearsal for Jake Heggie’s opera Moby-Dick, which the Dallas Opera premiered three years ago.

“I was invited by one of the composers at UNT to talk to the students,” Heggie recalls. “While I was there, the dean, Jim Scott, mentioned that they had this artist residency, and they wanted to put my name forward. The deal was that I would be in residence off and on a total of six weeks during the academic year, working with students, and that I would write a piece.”

The residency did happen. And on Wednesday evening, at the Murchison Performing Arts Center in Denton, the University of North Texas College of Music will present the second part of the deal: Heggie’s Ahab Symphony, for solo tenor, chorus and orchestra. David Itkin will conduct the UNT Symphony Orchestra and Grand Chorus, with tenor Richard Croft. Also on the program will be Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture and the Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s Peter Grimes.

As the title implies, the four-movement, 26-minute work is an outgrowth of Heggie’s opera, itself an adaptation of Herman Melville’s novel about a man’s tormented quest for a great white whale. It focuses particularly on the character of Captain Ahab, and Heggie figured there was more to explore.

“The more I thought about him,” Heggie says, “the more I thought how similar we are to him. His scars are visible outside his body, but we all have scars, and we all rail against the randomness of life.”

The text of the new work comes mainly from a 1939 W.H. Auden poem, Herman Melville, depicting the writer at the end of his life. It’s juxtaposed with a brief monologue from the last chapter of the Melville novel.

“It’s the moment when Ahab is going out to hunt the whale for the third day,” Heggie says. “He realizes that everything is exactly the same as when he was a boy — all his torments and worries — and yet there has never been a more beautiful day.

“I loved exploring the irony of that. He knows it’s his last day, probably, and he remarks how nothing has changed, and nothing would change.”

Yes, the new work does draw extensively from the music of the opera.

“Actually, that made it more difficult to write,” Heggie says. “I’ve kind of moved on from that musical language, but I wanted to open up that musical world again. There are definitely a few themes from the opera as well as a lot of new material.

“The Ahab theme that is present throughout the score of Moby-Dick, which is played by oboes, that exists. And music at the very beginning of the symphony is pulled from the moment in the opera when Ahab first spots the whale. It’s as though he has spotted the whale and time has stopped, and Ahab reflects for 26 minutes.”

The opera called for an all-male cast, except for a “trousers role” for the young boy Pip. The symphony, however, includes women in the large chorus.

“Whenever I write a character musically,” Heggie says, “I have to empathize deeply with that character, to love them and not judge them. Ahab can come across as a cardboard villain, but he’s a very complex, textured individual. Melville gives him the most textured language.”

“People are capable of monstrous, monstrous deeds,” Heggie says. “And yet they are people who grew up in societies like us, and we can never know why they went wrong. We have to realize that potential in pretty much all of us and hope that the good impulses win out.”

New book on opera

Robert K. Wallace, author of Heggieand Scheer’s ‘Moby-Dick’: A Grand Opera for the 20th Century, will be in the lobby of UNT’s Murchison Performing Arts Center between 5 and 6 p.m. Wednesday to sign copies of the new book. Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer will also be available. Extensively illustrated with photographs by Karen Almond and published by the University of North Texas Press, the book traces the development of the opera, which was commissioned and premiered by the Dallas Opera in 2010. Limited numbers of the book will be available for purchase at $45.